What Should I Monitor? A Practical Uptime Checklist for Your Website, App, or SaaS

You’ve got an uptime monitoring tool set up and you’re staring at an empty dashboard.

You know you should “add monitors”… but for what exactly? Just your homepage? Your API? Cron jobs? SSL certificates?

This post gives you a practical uptime monitoring checklist you can use with:

• Self-hosted uptime tools
• Hosted monitoring services like UpDog

We’ll talk in terms of common monitor types—HTTP(S), keyword checks, heartbeats, and SSL—so if you’re used to those patterns, UpDog will feel instantly familiar. The difference: UpDog is hosted for you and ships with preconfigured email and SMS alerts for your users and team.

Step 1: Start With User-Facing URLs (HTTP(S) Monitors)

The basic building block of most uptime tools is an HTTP(S) monitor.

Start by adding monitors for the URLs a real user hits first:

• Marketing site – e.g. https://yourdomain.com/
• App dashboard – e.g. https://app.yourdomain.com/
• Docs/help center – if it lives on a separate domain/subdomain
• Checkout/Sign-up page – the first step in your purchase or registration flow

How this looks in a typical uptime tool

1. Create a new monitor.
2. Set Type to HTTP(S).
3. Give it a clear name (e.g. “Marketing Site – Homepage”).
4. Paste the URL (e.g. https://yourdomain.com/).
5. Pick an interval (60-120 seconds is common for critical stuff).
6. Attach one or more notification channels.

How this maps to UpDog

In UpDog, you do the same thing:

• Create a new HTTP(S) monitor with the URL and interval.
• Choose which users or team members should be notified.
• UpDog already has email and SMS alerts preconfigured per user, so you don’t have to wire up SMTP or SMS gateways yourself.

This gets you from “empty dashboard” to “we’re monitoring the obvious stuff” in a couple of minutes.

Step 2: Use Keyword Checks for Real App Health

Sometimes an endpoint returns 200 OK even when it’s actually broken (error page, maintenance screen, etc.). That’s where keyword checks are useful.

The idea: hit an endpoint and look for a known-good keyword in the response body.

What to monitor with keyword checks

• /health or /status endpoints that return JSON
• Login/dashboard pages that should always contain a specific phrase (e.g. “Welcome back”)
• Lightweight API calls that return predictable text or JSON

In practice

1. Create an HTTP(S) monitor and enable keyword checking if your tool supports it.
2. Use the URL for your health endpoint – e.g. https://api.yourdomain.com/health.
3. Set the keyword (e.g. "status":"ok" or a short text snippet).
4. Choose whether the keyword must exist or must not exist.

In UpDog, you can configure a monitor for your health endpoint and tell it which keyword means “everything is fine.” When the keyword disappears, UpDog fires off the appropriate email and SMS alerts to the people you’ve assigned to that monitor.

Step 3: Monitor Background Jobs With Heartbeat Monitors

Some of the worst outages don’t crash your site—they quietly break your background jobs:

• Invoice runs stop processing.
• Email digests stop going out.
• Import/export jobs silently die.

For those, you want a heartbeat (or “push”) style monitor: the job pings your uptime tool on success. If the ping doesn’t arrive on schedule, you get alerted.

How a heartbeat monitor works

1. You create a heartbeat monitor in your uptime tool.
2. It gives you a unique URL.
3. Your cron job hits that URL (via curl, wget, etc.) when it finishes successfully.
4. If the tool doesn’t see a ping within the expected interval, it alerts you.

Example: Cron job that runs every 15 minutes

• Create a heartbeat monitor called “Process Email Queue”.
• Set the expected interval to 15 minutes plus a grace period.
• At the end of your job, add: curl https://your-heartbeat-url.

In UpDog, you’d create a cron/heartbeat monitor, copy the check-in URL, and drop it into your job. If the job stops checking in, UpDog automatically emails and texts the users you’ve assigned to that monitor so it doesn’t stay broken for days.

Step 4: Watch SSL/TLS Certificates (So You Don’t Get “Your Connection Is Not Private”)

Alongside basic HTTP checks, you should also track SSL/TLS certificate expiry for your HTTPS endpoints.

This is especially important if:

• You rely on automated renewal (e.g. Let’s Encrypt) that you assume is working.
• You have a mix of certs across providers and can’t keep them all in your head.

In a typical uptime tool

• Create an HTTP(S) monitor for your site.
• Enable certificate monitoring if it’s not on by default.
• Set how many days before expiry you want a warning (e.g. 30 days).

In UpDog, monitoring a HTTPS URL can also include certificate expiry tracking. When your cert is nearing expiry, UpDog sends email and SMS alerts with enough lead time to renew or debug your automation.

Step 5: Use Ping and Port Checks When They Make Sense

Not everything is an HTTP endpoint. Many uptime tools also support:

• Ping – ICMP ping to see if a server is alive.
• Port/TCP – check if a given port is reachable (e.g. 22, 5432, 6379).

These are useful when:

• You expose a database or cache within a private network and want to know if it’s reachable.
• You want a simple “is this box alive at all?” check separate from HTTP.

UpDog supports similar infrastructure-level checks, but for many SaaS apps you’ll get most of the value from HTTP(S) + keyword + heartbeat monitors. Add ping/port monitors when you know you need them.

Step 6: Configure Alerts Like a Human, Not a Server

Uptime isn’t just about what you monitor—it’s about who gets notified and how noisy it is.

For each monitor, decide:

• Who should be alerted? – founder, on-call engineer, shared team channel?
• How? – email, SMS, chat, or a mix?
• What’s “critical” vs “nice to know”?

In self-hosted tools, this often means setting up your own SMTP server and wiring external providers for SMS.

In UpDog, that’s all baked in:

• Each user has email alerts ready to go.
• You can enable SMS alerts without building your own integration.
• Monitors are assigned to users or teams, and UpDog takes care of actually delivering the alerts.

A simple alerting strategy

• Critical monitors (API health, app login, checkout): email + SMS to whoever is on call.
• Important monitors (marketing site, docs): email to the team, maybe SMS only during working hours.
• Cron/heartbeat monitors: email plus a channel where devs will see it.

Step 7: Expose the Right Monitors on a Status Page

Monitoring tells you what’s wrong. A status page tells everyone else.

A simple status page might include:

• Marketing site
• App/API
• Background processing
• Third-party dependencies (if you monitor them)

Many tools let you build a public or semi-public status page out of selected monitors. UpDog does too: you can attach monitors to a shareable status page and use that as the single source of truth during incidents.

A Practical Uptime Checklist You Can Use Today

Here’s a quick checklist you can work through using UpDog or any similar monitor:

1. HTTP(S) monitors

• Homepage / marketing site
• App login/dashboard
• Docs / help center
• Checkout / sign-up page

2. Keyword checks

• /health or /status endpoint with a predictable JSON response
• Key API endpoints with known-good responses

3. Heartbeat monitors

• Nightly billing / invoicing cron jobs
• Email queue / notification jobs
• Import/export or sync workers

4. SSL and infrastructure

• SSL/TLS certificate expiry for every public HTTPS endpoint
• Optional: Ping/TCP checks for critical servers

5. Alerts & status page

• Attach email and SMS alerts for critical monitors.
• Make sure at least one person is always reachable for truly critical checks.
• Publish a basic status page for customer-facing components.

If You Don’t Want to Host Your Own Uptime Stack…

If you’re happy managing servers, certificates, and notification providers yourself, this checklist works with any self-hosted uptime tool.

If you prefer the same style of monitors—HTTP(S), keyword, heartbeat, SSL, and more—without owning the infrastructure, UpDog gives you:

• Hosted monitoring for your websites, APIs, ports, and cron jobs.
• Preconfigured email + SMS alerts for your users and teams.
• Shareable status pages so you can keep customers in the loop during incidents.

Either way, the important part is the same: you know what to monitor, and you actually set it up.